


Anthropophagy

by villainousPainter



Category: Original Work
Genre: Asperger Syndrome, Cannibalism, Clans, Clanwars, Dark, Drug Use, Gen, Genderfluid Character, Gore, Hacking, Horror, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Original Character(s), Original Fiction, Slavery, Violence, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-29
Updated: 2015-12-29
Packaged: 2018-05-10 03:10:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5568556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/villainousPainter/pseuds/villainousPainter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After being captured and enslaved, a hacker is caught in a war between clans of people who must consume human tissue to survive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anthropophagy

**Author's Note:**

> So this is me, hi. Most of the time I start writing something, I end up losing the willpower to continue it after two pages. I feel like if I post my stuff on AO3 it will at least provide me with some incentive. Sort of like a weak attempt at auto-blackmail. I decided to post this, because I really like this work (which is rare, I usually hate most stuff I write); more specifically I love torturing my own characters.

“There's no fucking way. Get the hell out of my apartment.” Collin said coolly, his eyes burning like ice.

 

“A little molly never hurt anybody. Come on, please; I don't want to be the only one doing it.” Collin's boyfriend, Tony, replied, attempting to use puppy-dog eyes.

 

“If you don't want to do it alone, then maybe, don't do it. Even if I would do ecstasy, most molly, these days, isn't even real, especially some shit that you probably bought off the street.”

 

“My dealer's a really nice guy.” Tony face held an expression like his dealing being nice or not actually meant something.

 

“Who probably failed his high school's introductory chem class. Look you can do whatever you fucking want. I wouldn't give a shit if you decided to do heroin, just don't fucking involve me.” Collin's eyes pained his boyfriend to look at from their coldness and burning intensity. Seeing Collin, adamant in his decision, Tony stepped into the doorway between Collin's room and the apartment hall. The apartment building was run down and smelled like something had died in the cracked walls. Collin didn't have a very high paycheck and quality of living spaces wasn't a high priority to him.

 

“You have a real problem. You find people who are all fucked up and at their worst, and you pretend that you’re all understanding because you're perfect, but you're not. You’re understanding because you’re the most fucked up of anyone. You use people because you just want to stay in denial of how fucked up you really are.”

 

“Shut the fuck up and get out of my apartment,” Collin hissed before shouting “Get out now!” Collin shoved Tony out the door before slamming it shut. Tony had stumbled back, looking up at the closed door and the source of locks clicking shut.

 

Collin sat down on his couch and huddled on one side. He didn't want to think about what had just happened. He had been with Tony for about a month and he had actually liked him. Now a stupid fight about drugs had resulted in what looked like the beginning of their separation. Tony's words echoed in Collin's head: “you're the most fucked up of anyone.”

 

“I should have just done those fucking drugs. It's not like I give my liver a break anyways.” Collin sat in silence, staring at his laptop. Originally it was installed with Windows 10 or 'the OS from hell' as Collin would say. Everything was wrong with it, it was full of adds and updates for things Collin had no use for, it was riddled with errors, and Microsoft's attitude that the ideal user should just entertain themselves with programs you have to pay obscene amounts of money for, progressively drove him to madness. The replacement with Ubuntu felt almost like an exorcism of some foul demon; about the only Ubuntu drawbacks affecting Collin were was MASM wasn't compatible, but he quickly learned how to use NASM syntax from his experience.

 

Collin's desktop picture was a colourful, abstract piece of digital art taken from deviantArt. He had used to use representational images but quickly abandoned them because he would be annoyed when his desktop icons would cover the details up. Over top of the picture was a mess of folders and files. Most of his folders, often untitled, just kept gigabytes of pictures, music, videos, and PDFs he had saved from the internet. Most of them, he hadn't even look at since he saved them but he had created special groups for copies of files that meant something to him. The rest of the folders contained things like programs he had made, saving source code wherever he could: the majority of these were written in C or Python. There was also a folder for unfinished work containing dozens of abandoned files that would probably never work; still, Collin would sometimes find use of functioning fragments of code, sometimes even combining them into a “Franken-file” made of sloppily pulled together programs, with just enough error-correction to run correctly, albeit with many warnings from the GNU compiler. This was a reflection of Collin's lifestyle, expending just enough effort to accomplish something, only investing great effort into things that really mean something to him. Getting caught doing illegal things was a big priority to him, so any spyware he wrote was thoroughly checked for mistakes and only used after testing himself. Collin opened on of these files up in gedit, getting lost in its flow and logic, and disconnecting from the world around him where he had just fucked up with one of the only people who didn't hate him.

 

Collin was knocked out of his haze by screaming from the hallway. Quickly getting up and unlocking his door, he peaked his head out of the doorway. At that moment everything stopped. The source of the scream was Collin's neighbour, Mrs. Miller. The Millers were a young newly-wed couple two door up from Collin's. They had always seemed out of place for where they lived, standing out as the clean, happy, and naive couple. When they had moved in Collin had immediate suspicion towards them, but after investigation, grew to be friendly towards them. He didn't see many honest people in the world but the Millers were an exception, which at least warranted a “good morning,” if they came across each other in the hall. Mrs. Miller was backed up against the wall, looking like she would vomit. She and the rest of the surrounding area were covered in blood, the source being her husband's neck. He clutched his neck, trying to keep blood from pooling out but only succeeded in chocking himself on it. Mr. Miller's attacker moved towards the dying man's wife, quickly slamming the knife up to the hilt into her temple causing her body to spasm uncontrollably.

 

“Holy shit! Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Collin said, slamming his door shut much more audibly than he had intended. Collin fumbled with the lock, his trembling hands making it hard to do anything. He had just clicked the look shut when a large force struck the door and knocked him back. Collin scrambled across the floor to his bedroom, quickly dialling '911' on his phone. Just as the operator picked up the front door smashed open wide. The attacker was very tall at least 180 centimetres in a black hoodie, cheap sneakers, and blue jeans. His face was gaunt, a quality only accentuated by his sunken in eyes and prominent cheek bones, and masked in a layer of sandy-brown stubble. The attacker glanced around the room, eyes looking on Collin's laptop screen and the jumble of code on it.

 

“No, stay back! Y‒ you don't have to do this! I'll be quiet‒ I won't tell anyone! Please!” Collin stammered. The attacker quickly moved forward, striking Collin's head with the handle of his knife in one swift blow; Collin's vision quickly faded to black.

 

When Collin came to, he gasped for breath starting to hyperventilate at his situation. He was in a metal cage, roughly about a metre in width, and 1.5 metres in height and length. Collin couldn't stand completely straight in it, and had to crouch on his knees. The cage was mostly covered in a tarp but the door was exposed, letting in dim light from a dying florescent light. The room looked grungy; with concrete flooring and walls and a large, metal door. There were several other cages scattered around the room, and Collin could see that at least the ones that weren't covered were empty.

 

“Okay, there's nobody around, this might be your only shot,” Collin thought to himself. Crawling to the door to get a better look at it he saw it was padlocked. After jerking with the lock for several seconds, he turned his body around so he was sitting with his feet towards the door. Collin pushed his hands into the floor for support as he drove his foot against the cage repeatedly. The silent room seemed to channel the sound of rattling. After about a minute, Collin heard the metal door to the room push open. Collin threw himself away from the cage door, crawling to get as far back as possible.

 

“It's you're lucky day, apparently some of the other tenants at your apparently had an accident.” The speaker walked towards cage and bent down to look through the door. He was a shorter man who looked to be in his forties, wearing a dark brown suit, with a greying, dark beard and thick eyebrows. His shiny, white teeth gave him a maniacal look, accentuating his grin. “Mind you, we've got to ask ourselves: how long can you stay lucky? You know anything about computers?”

 

Collin nodded, terrified, “yes.”

 

“Lawson said your laptop had some interesting stuff on screen. Mind you, he isn't exactly a technician but according to him, you had some complicated code up there. ‘Like something you would see on a movie about hackers,’ he said.”

 

“Oh, shit. Did I hack this guy or something? What if I pissed off some sort of gang boss?” Collin thought.

 

“See, we need people with skills; we're mostly covered for getting rid of people who get to know too much, but every once and a while some idiot posts shit on the internet or sends stuff to the police, not to mention there's a war going on all around us‒ a war so big that it even extends into espionage and cyber-terrorism. Lawson might be an uneducated, good-for-nothing-except-hunting shithead but he does understand our need for help, even if it is from a slave.”

 

“S‒ slave? I'm a slave?” Collin felt his blood leave his limbs and his stomach twist in a knot.

 

“Well, put it this way, you already know too much and like I said, we have people for that. So really you're only options are to work for us or die.”

 

“O‒ Okay, I‒ I'll work for you,” Collin stammered, terrified this was a trick and he would end up getting killed.

 

“Excellent, I'll have you taken to registration. Don't worry, we'll explain everything eventually, but for now all you need to know is that you're going to get a small tattoo and that will be your ID number, from that point you'll be under clan-ownership until we can find you a master.” The man was grinning maniacally as ever, shiny eyes stabbing into Collin. He pulled out a key from his left pocket and held it in front of the cage and said menacingly, “Don't you dare run. Run and I'll kill you. Got it?” Before he had even gotten a response he opened the lock to the cage. Collin looked fearfully at the man and crawled out of the cage. He looked at the door and thought about running but rationalized that the man could have killed him at any time while he was in the cage so there must be some truth to what the man had said and his chances of living wouldn't increase by running.

 

“Where are you taking me?” Collin said, pushing his emotions back.

 

“Excellent, you chose to stay with us. The registration centre is in North Banker, do you know were that is?” The man said eyeing Collin, looking for responses. Collin nodded. North Banker had a reputation as a morally- and legally-grey area and the police avoided it for that reason, thereby continuing that greyness. Collin had done business there once, meeting up with a client to sell them documents from a company competing with theirs. From what little of the area he had been in, he had no interest in going back there even with his low-standards of society. “I'm sorry but you're going to still have to wear these‒ for safety.” The man said holding up plastic ties.

 

“Who's safety?”

 

“I honestly have no idea. It's just the rules. Name's Brown by the way, Joel Brown.”

 

“Collin Holloway.” Collin eyed the man suspiciously and thought, “for some criminal freak, he seems to be cheerful and polite.” He extended his wrists which were quickly bound. Brown opened the metal door and gestured for Collin to go through but just as he was about to, Brown's arm shot in front of Collin.

 

“Remember this kid, be careful. There are some of us who would like nothing more than to rip you in half, and those are some of the people who decide your fate too.” Brown's eyes grew sinister again and Collin saw the same person who had him in a cage and threatened to kill him if he ran. Brown opened the passenger-side-door of a black Mustang and said, “I'm sorry for this, I really am.”

 

The trip to North Banker was quiet and extremely long‒ or at least felt like it. Collin had just come to the full realization that he was giving his life away to become a slave. Immediately Collin's mind drifted to what would happen if he did run but quickly forced his attention elsewhere. “You're already here now; there's no changing the past, I can only move forward. Like Brown said, ‘ you're only options are to work for us or die.’ What's done is done,” Collin thought.

 

“We're here,” Brown said. They had arrived at a large warehouse that looked like it hadn't been used in years. Graffiti coated the walls and the few windows on the building were smashed. Brown parked his car at an odd angle in the middle of the almost empty car lot that crossed over multiple parking spaces. As Collin walked towards the building, he began getting increasingly disturbed; the building seemed to leer towards him like it would swallow him up. Brown didn't seem to notice but he did loose anything ‘friendly’ about him. At this moment, he had a serious look stretched across his face and possibly a hint of apathy. Apathy towards Collin or whatever would happen to him.

 

Inside of the building everything changed from ominous to terrifying: the building was cold enough for Collin to see his breath; there were hundreds of cages scattered all over the warehouse, just like the room Collin woke up in, only many of these had people inside‒ crying, cowering, frightened people of all ages. There was a large metal table in the middle of the room, covered in blood. People were dragged from the cages, stripped, and restrained onto it‒ their necks quickly cut open and bled out into a hole on the table. After that, their bodies would be suspended by large, sharp meat hooks. Some of the people in the cages would be selected by someone and led into a backroom.

 

“No, no, no, no no! Please don't do this; I can't do this! Please!” Collin felt like he was going to be sick. He began taking gulps of the freezing air, trying not to vomit. Brown looked at him with that same apathetic, serious gaze. Collin felt like everything around him was beginning to detach, everything was so surreal but it also felt like one of the realest things he had ever experienced. “Y‒ you! You're all fucked up. You're just sick.”

 

“Shut up, kid,” Brown said menacingly. Brown grabbed Collin by the wrists and began pulling him through a door into the backroom. Collin was on the verge of breaking down. The backroom was currently empty, the only things in it were two metal chairs. Collin was pushed into one of the chairs, his bonds cut, only to be tied down to the chair. “Sorry about this, kid,” Brown said as he pushed through the doorway, looking back with what might have been his most genuine apology. Collin felt sick, Brown just kept apologizing but forcing him into worse and worse situations.

 

The room was silent, Collin's head turned around the room. There wasn't any windows, only the flicker of cheap fluorescent lighting. He sat in the room for about a minute wondering what would happen until the door clicked open, breaking the silence. A androgynous figure, a little older than Collin stepped in. They were his height but could have been a little shorter, in a black tank-top, combat boots, and ripped blue-jeans. Their brown hair was pulled back into a tight bun only adding to their sharp angular face.

 

“Well it's good to see you're not pissing yourself, my respect for you has grown. I'm Tori and according to Joel you're name's Collin Holloway. Now let's get down to bee's wax. What do you know about us so far?”

 

“I don't know anything. All I know is you killed the Millers and however many other people. I don't know much else, just stuff I heard Brown mention‒ taking slaves and something about a war?”

 

“Well, your definitely too far in the loop to back out now. Also thank you! You have no idea how much I hate it when I ask a question and some loser-freak-shithead's like, ‘please don't kill me.’ Anyways, without getting too far into it, yes there is a war. A war between the clans. For clarity think of it like a gang-war. Our strain has always had civil conflict, the only issue with it is we have to remain hidden.”

 

“What do you mean by ‘your strain?’”

 

“The genetic strain we each have. That's the whole reason why we kill. Our bodies have a recessive, hereditary condition that forces us to consume material of our own species. I'm not a scientist but I bet it has something to do with the way we digest it. Like our bodies are designed to break down material similar to itself,” Tori said casually. The calm look it their cold, ice-blue eyes terrified Collin. This was a person who was discussing cannibalism like it was perfectly acceptable.

 

“You eat p‒ people?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“You eat people. That's why those people were being hung on hooks and in cages.”

 

“Look, we aren't a lot different from a beef company. Anyways, the other thing is I'm sorry to say but cannibalism isn't exactly our worst. Part of having to stay under society's radar for so long, our culture has gotten pretty fucked up. If we don't eat people without the gene, they become our slaves. I'm your assigned counsellor, it's like a shitty version of social services for slaves. Basically you're going to become a clan-owned slave, you have to follow what the clan orders you to do. I act as a sort of 'stand-in-owner' as far as our bad imitation of a legal system is concerned, handling your paperwork and stuff. Depending on how things go, you may or may not get an actual master, a sole owner.”

 

“I'm not going to have to… you know, for anyone am I?” Collin's voice cracked, everything seemed so distant.

 

“I'm sorry, I really am. While your under clan-ownership that's not likely, but as for a sole master… I'm part of registration, I have no actual choice in the matter of who buys you from the clan. Depending on who they are, they may ask you to do things… You're a slave, as far as any of us are concerned, you're meant to serve and are expendable to the point where your master could decide to have you as a snack.”

 

“What exactly is registration?” Collin asked looking away from their face.

 

“Well, you've already completed the first part of registration, you responded pretty well with the information I've given you. Part two is I need to know if there is any particular aspect about you that could impact whether or not you should be a slave. According to Brown that dipshit, Kyle Lawson, found evidence that your good with computers? Like, how good?”

 

“I can program in C, Python, PHP, Java, and Assembly in both MASM and NASM syntax for the Intel processor. I have some experience in shell scripting and I'm pretty good as far as digging around website's HTML. I did work experience at an infotech security company for about a week.” Collin just stared at Tori's blank expression.

 

“Okay… well I didn't understand a whole lot of that but I'll assume that means pretty good. I've also had a ‘friend’ forward me your medical records. You suffer from depression and anxiety, the latter is attributed to Asperger's Syndrome. You have a history of substance use and abuse, mostly with alcohol but occasionally with recreational marijuana use. Your prescription records show you were given Prozac, Luvox, Ativan, Zoloft‒ Jesus, It's a good thing Kyle didn't kill you, you would've been wasted meat. Your kidneys must look like shit now.”

 

Collin laughed, “It's fucking stupid because right before the guy knocked me out, I ended up kicking my boyfriend out because he wanted me to do molly with him. I'm so fucking stupid.”

 

Tori looked at him with an almost sympathetic expression. “If it helps, you sort of did him a favour, you're here because you have a bunch of weird hacker-shit in your apartment. If you hadn't kicked him out, he probably wouldn't have been extended the same luxury you were. Anyways, enough about men. The last thing I need right now is another reminder that I'm gonna phase in and out of dysphoria for my whole damn life. That reminds me, if I'm gonna be your counsellor, you should know that I go by ‘they,’ since you probably don't want to have to put up with me being a douche and getting you to change pronouns every hour. So, have you ever had a tattoo before?”

 

“Not really. I mostly get piercings done because I want the option of getting rid of something if it looks like shit.” Collin thought back to occasions where he would look at himself in the mirror with annoyance, wanting nothing more than to be someone else so he could find himself decent to look at‒ too-broad shoulders, spindly arms and legs, and porous, yellowed teeth. He would pay to get something to distract from his face, but would end up getting frustrated if they looked off.

 

“Well, you don't have to worry about that. Your tattoo is going to be a small string of numbers, a piece of ID. Your ID number isn't much different from a Social Insurance Number, most of the time it's just used for slave trade within and between clans. Once you get your ID we can see about finding you residence, all provided by ‘the great and merciful, Clan of Imbrium.’”

 

“Clan of Imbrium?”

 

“Ya, our clan. I mentioned it's like gang stuff; there are primary clans, the big sharks. There are also a lot of smaller clans that usually fight over scraps but usually their not stupid enough to piss off the big guys. This whole territory belongs to Clan Imbrium. You're also going to be part of Clan Imbrium or at least property of us. The other clans include Clan Frigoris, Clan Nubium, Clan Serenitatis, Clan Procellarum, and Clan Fecunditatis. The main clan war is between Frigoris, our allies, and Procellarum, who are allies with Serenitatis. Clan Nubium and Fecunditatis are just sort of neutral. Nubium are hyper-aggressive assholes who hate everybody and everything. Right now we're trying to establish relations with Fecunditatis, if we can get them into this we might be able to shift the war in our favour. Anyways, enough about that, this isn't a social studies lesson; let's get you some numbers, hold on.”

 

Tori left the room, leaving Collin to think about what they said. He was being forced into working for a clan of cannibalistic people, who are in the middle of a war. On the other hand, his only other option would be getting killed. Collin was knocked out of his train of thought by Tori entering the room with a tattoo gun.

 

“Ready for your life of slavery?”

 

“As I'll ever be.” The process wasn't painful so much as discomforting‒ he craned his neck to the right tried his best to relax as Tori marked his neck. After it was finished, Collin looked in the small hand mirror Tori provided him. 274-000-558. This was his new identity.


End file.
